This chapter examines some of the implications of the first lines of the Introduction, which argue that language in its material strangeness has the power to advance feminist, queer, intersectional politics. In the Introduction I discussed the queer nature of the restless terminological propulsion: the proliferation of neologisms. Here I discuss the spatiotemporal movement and organisation of language when it is made strange; I present queer defamiliarisation as a reconfiguration of linguistic spatiotemporality. It is this reconfiguration that foregrounds language as matter, among other actions and gestures: stuttering, repetition, interruption, equivocation, neologism and diffracted or spliced morphemes. This chapter considers these linguistic operations in the light of categories of identity formation, with a particular focus on some of the ways that these operations can be defamiliarised or deformed.

The conventional axes underpinning structuralist linguistics are usually considered as that of the horizontal syntagmatic and vertical paradigmatic orders. The figures discussed in this chapter queer both the syntactic line and the paradigmatic order of their material-discursive frameworks. Synvariance is a queering (or a defamiliarising) of both syntax and invariance, which is to say a reorientation of both. Syntax generally constitutes the logical stringing-together of words in order to make sense. Invariance generally constitutes a principle of constancy or universality: that which does not vary. These two concepts are brought together here because they both constitute certain spatiotemporal presuppositions: syntax generally requires some kind of linearity, while invariance generally requires some kind of stasis. Some of the examples discussed in this chapter challenge the notion of temporal linearity or succession; others challenge the notion of invariance in language and in the world. Some do both at the same time.

What do structuralist lingustics and intersectional feminism have in common? In short: they both make use of axes, and the nature of these axes has been subject to critique. Does it make sense to perceive of language stretched across spatiotemporal axes? Does it make sense to perceive of categories of oppression organised along spatiotemporal axes? What does new materialism have in common with these questions? These questions form the basis of this chapter.